# Towards Detecting Inauthentic Coordination in Twitter Likes Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07384 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07384/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 12 May 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Multimodal Coordinated Online Behavior: Trade-offs and Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12108/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Social media feeds typically favor posts according to user engagement. The most ubiquitous type of engagement (and the type we study) is *likes*. Users customarily take engagement metrics such as likes as a neutral proxy for quality and authority. This incentivizes like manipulation to influence public opinion through *coordinated inauthentic behavior* (CIB). CIB targeted at likes is largely unstudied as collecting suitable data about users' liking behavior is non-trivial. This paper contributes a scripted algorithm to collect suitable liking data from Twitter and a collected 30 day dataset of liking data from the Danish political Twittersphere #dkpol, over which we analyze the script's performance. Using only the binary matrix of users and the tweets they liked, we identify large clusters of perfectly correlated users, and discuss our findings in relation to CIB.